Stake Land (Review)

Stake Land

Stake Land (2011)

Directed by Jim Mickle

When I saw the trailer for Jim Mickle's Stake Land, I have to say I got excited. Mickle's Mulberry Street to me is one of the best films to come out of the lame-o After Dark Horrorfests. So after tackling zombies, the next logical step has to be vampires right?

Stake Land draws a world of post apocalyptic America filled with non sparkly vampires and religious extremism taken to it's most extreme. Comparisons to The Road meets the Walking Dead meets Red State have to be made. And these are all good things in an above average flick. Characters come first in Stake Land, with eerie scenes of a wrinkled and abandoned America coming in second and finally fight scenes coming in at bronze.

There are no 3D gimmicks or star power to drive Stake Land. That's the beauty of a straight forward genre piece by Mickle. You're here to enjoy the road trip of these rag tag strangers who are looking for the mystical New Eden. Like in all road trips, you're going to get bored a few times along the way and Stake Land does suffer from stretches of boring nothingness. Not even a hint of dialogue to get more character development.

But clearly you have to take the good with the bad. Stake Land is a safe bet, a sunny day in a world of the bloody thirsty.

Boring Plot-O-Matic

Martin was a normal teenage boy before the country collapsed in an empty pit of economic and political disaster. A vampire epidemic has swept across what is left of the nation's abandoned towns and cities, and it's up to Mister, a death dealing, rogue vampire hunter, to get Martin safely north to Canada, the continent's New Eden.

Awesome Review-O-Matic

No extensive review here. I'm sure you can browse through the IMDB external reviews to get what you need about plot and such. I'm going to just give you a few thoughts on the film via list form because well I can't come up with coherent sentences.

• Mister (Nick Damici) is one badass vampire motherfuckin hunter. A tough guy's tough guy. No jokey slayer. Nuff said.
• Martin is Daniel-son, padwan and youngling. I like how the opening credits are a freakin training montage.
• Their one man wolfpack includes: a nun, the lovely pregnant Danielle Harris and a Marine brotha
• I loved the backdrops of burnt out cars, houses and vampires hanging on ropes. Just great post apocalyptic scenery bordering on a Hollywood set design. This might not be to far off from the real America.
• Jebedia and the Brotherhood seems like a extreme satire on all that is Republican religious right wing nutzoids. I know these people actually exist but in Stake Land they come out as a crazy cult bent on survival. It seem to unbelievable to me but I'll give it a pass
• The American government and military seem so half ass in a vampire apocalyptic world. I would hope they wouldn't fold this easy.
• The father-son relationship between Mister and Martin is solid, pretty much the driving force of the flick.
• The action scenes are straightforward. Gunshots, slicing and dicing, stake through the hearts, yada yada yada.
  
• Who dies first...the nun or the brotha?
• The final battle is sad and sadder and saddest
  
• The ending is clearly a nod to all zombie flick endings

Stake Land is indie horror with a precision pulse on the genre. A lot of indie films try to emulate a post apocalyptic world be it zombies or vampires but Stake Land is one of the few that does it right. It's a little slow at times, yes even boring at points, the characters aren't totally flushed out, a few hiccups with the plot and story but all are minor grievances in an otherwise fresh take on the vampire run amok genre.

I can only guess where Mickle will go next. Maybe werewolves? How about a regular slasher flick? Maybe even a killer shark. I can see Mickle headed towards some big budget remake and I'm praying that doesn't happen.

That would be a stake right through my fuckin heart.

Nude-ipedia

Nada

Gore-ipedia

Your standard stuff

WTF moment

Danielle Harris.....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Jaded Viewer's Final Prognosis

The movie is now out on DVD via IFC Films. I'm sure you can Netflix it or whatever. It's a good solid 140 min and has a few themes running through it for the more intellectual horror fan. You'll definitely leave feeling like you've seen a solid horror flick.

The Vitals

• The official site

Rating:


Trailer

Categories: 2011 horror movies, Apocalypse, danielle harris, indepentent horror, indie horror, jim mickle, larry fesseden, post apocalyptic, stake land, stake land teaser, stake land trailer, vampires

Stake Land (Teaser Trailer)

The one thing I do is try to support the NYC indie horror scene as best I can. Sometimes it means promoting some friend's friend horror flick. But the name that has become synonymous within NYC horror is Larry Fessenden.

Fessenden Glass Eye Pix has produced some of the more interesting horror flicks that have come out. And now he is producing Jim Mickle's new movie Stake Land. Mickle first hit the horror radar with his After Dark Horrorfest flick Mulberry Street (full review here) which I dug very much. That flick was about terrorizing the infamous street in NYC.

With Stake Land (such an awesome title), he's going to bring the urban and road gritty setting and blend it into the vampire genre. Let the Right One In this is not. Fuck Twatlight and all the other pussy vampire shit that's coming out. These are the hard hittin, evil fucked up kind of vampires that don't give a shit about romantic tweens. They'd rather rip their necks apart and splatter their intestines across the desert.

Check out the teaser trailer below.






Here's the official site.

Categories: i can see you, jim mickle, larry fesseden, mulberry street, stake land, stake land teaser, stake land trailer

After Dark Horrorfest 2007: Mulberry Street (Review)

Mulberry Street

Mulberry Street (2006)

Directed by Jim Mickle

28 Days of the Diary of the Clover-Rats.

If George A. Romero made a zombie-verse and Matt Reeves made an alien monster world, director Jim Mickle has made a rat monster utopia in Mulberry Street. It’s by far the better of the 3 movies either director made this year.

With a guerilla, docu-style and the nitty gritty look of NYC’s Mulberry Street as his backdrop, Mickle takes us into an apocalyptic city nightmare come true. Because as every New Yorker knows, the 2 things we hate the most are tourists and rats.

Our main “Ben” (aka lead character from NOTLD) is Clutch, a former boxer who lives in an apartment on Mulberry Street (it’s the main street in NYC’s Little Italy). With his friend Coco, they eagerly await for Clutch’s daughter Casey to return home from Iraq. We also meet the other tenants in this dilapidated complex, Charlie and Frank who are a couple of old timers and Kay, a bartender and her son.

It’s never explained what caused the “sickness” that is making every New Yorker slowly turn into rat creatures but that’s not important. What is important is that we see a depiction of real New Yorkers dealing with a supernatural threat and basically doing what we always do, survive. There is no nauseating shaky camera, no annoying hipster looking for their girlfriend and no film students trying to film something so they can post it on YouTube.

What we do have is seeing the pseudo-realistic media coverage of a threat and the response to it with some very chilling scenes of attacks from a mass of rat infected zombies.

I know what you’re saying. Really? Rat creatures?

It’s not as cheesy as it sounds. The infected don’t develop RAGE like super strength or quickness but become, well more psychopathic and ratty. And boy are these creatures hungry and bloodthirsty. The tenants have to pummel and kick and fight thru the city streets in order to survive. These are all fast paced and suspenseful scenes and are quite well done.

Mulberry Street uses the same genre conventions of a Living Dead or a 28 Days Later. And even though they may be assembly line tricks of the trade, they work.

And that’s the fun of Mulberry Street.

Jim Mickle also takes a page from Romero’s satire handbook by not so subtly commentating on the world, post 9/11. More specifically, the slow government response to a Severe Red Theat Level event (the President was in Bermuda!) is an obvious crack at the government’s reaction and response to Hurricane Katrina.

The only negatives are that the movie does look a little like a 99 cents store. The acting was very plausible though the dialogue was a little dry. The special effects seemed to be Sci-Fi channel-ish and the darkness blurred many scenes into utter static. But on a meager budget, Mickle used quick shots, music video style editing and a couple of good gory bloodbaths to get his point across.

Mulberry Street is the biggest gem in the After Dark Horrorfest catalog. So if you didn’t like the zombie or giant lobster monster movies you watched this year, maybe enter the cannibal-rat monster-verse, it’s a cheesy movie you probably might like.

As this was a DVD, I was able to watch the extras as well. Here's a recap.

The Extras:

The extras are pretty bland in comparison to the movie. There are storyboards, 2 deleted scenes which pretty much sums up that most of the cut is the finished product. Also included are director’s Jim Mickle’s early sketches of scenes and of the rat monsters (which would make great background wallpaper). There are makeup tests which are hilarious as you can see the evolution of what the rat creatures were to become. Also, there are behind the scenes of ratty munching and outtakes which are always funny as this is a horror film about rat infected humans.

Finally there are behind the scenes of the rats that are featured predominately in the movie. From the looks of it rats never follow their cues and are so demanding with their list of outrageous demands.

Included in all of the After Dark Horrorfest DVDs are the Miss Horrorfest Contest webisodes. Think Surreal Life meets the Misfits. It’s a VH1 version of the Suicide Girls.

Rating:

The Trailer:



Tags:
mulberry street, jim mickle , little italy , rat creatures, rat monsters , cloverfield, diary of the dead,
after dark horrorfest, mulberry street trailer

Categories: after dark, after dark horrorfest 2008, cloverfield, diary of the dead, horrorfest, jim mickle, little italy, mulberry street, mulberry street trailer, nyc rat monsters, rat creatures, rat monsters